Robert Edison Sandiford The disasters of 9/11 trigger a Cataclysm that is unleashed every so many cycles. It can only be averted by the selfless act of the Elect, a trio of exceptional humans who are guided by Milton, a being known as an Elder. The three, all Barbadians, are David Rayside, Marsha Durant and Franck Hurley. And it is their time: to save the world before the deadliest characters of their legends and myths-the baccou, the steel donkey, la djablès, and the heart man-destroy it.... All their lives, the Elect have had their abilities: David, the power of flight; Marsha, incredible strength; and Franck, super speed. With great power may come great responsibility, yet the choice to act or not remains theirs. Milton, like his adversary, Mackie (short for Machiavelli), is an Elder who can inform, not influence, the course of events. Are the Elect mature enough to decide what's best for humanity? The longer they take to agree to Milton's plan, which he can't reveal until they are all on board, the more their world is overrun with Caribbean folklore creatures.... Set in Bridgetown and Montreal ('where much of the Diaspora live'), And Sometimes They Fly questions notions of the heroic. Where do heroes-a region's but also a culture's heroes-come from? George Woodcock once noted that, unlike Americans or the British, 'Canadians do not like heroes, and so they do not have them.' Humanity is in trouble if this is also true about Barbadians.

Jamaica Kincaid The island of Antigua is a magical place: growing up there should be a sojourn in paradise for young Annie John. But, as in the basket of green figs carried on her mother's head, there is a snake hidden somewhere within. Annie John begins by adoring her beautiful mother, but inexplicably she comes to hate her. Adolescence takes this brilliant, headstrong girl into open rebellions and secret discoveries - and finally to a crisis of emotions that wrenches her away from her island home.

Robert Antoni Winner of the 2014 OCM Bocas Prize!

Included in World Literature Today's Nota Benes, Summer 2014

One of Edwidge Danticat's Best Books of 2013, the New Yorker

A Favorite Novel of 2013, Tin House

"William's account of young love attests to Antoni's fluency in the poetry of nostalgia. In words as vibrant as the personalities he creates, Antoni deftly captures unconquered territories and the risks we’re willing to take exploring them."
—Publishers Weekly

"The emotional influence of Willy’s narrative—his loving descriptions of the people who surround him—is profoundly effective...Strikes strong emotional chords."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Antoni...has written a novel epic in scope that...is driven by outbursts of fine writing."
—Booklist

"A rollicking 19th-century colonial tale blends history with imagination."
—Library Journal

"Robert Antoni gracefully combines layers of idealism, love, and a plague of the Black Vomit in this historical novel."
—World Literature Today

"It brings the travails and small delights of Willy Tucker to the centre stage of our imaginings, asking only that we accompany him on this unforgettable voyage."
—Caribbean Beat

"This tragic historical novel, accented with West Indian cadence and captivating humour, provides an unforgettable glimpse into 19th-century T&T. The book’s narrator, Willy, falls headover-heels for the enthralling and wise Marguerite Whitechurch. Coming from the gentry, Marguerite is a world away from Willy's labouring class."
—The Trinidad Guardian, one of the Best Caribbean Books of the Year

"Reminds us that storytelling is fundamental to the human condition...A contending classic of postcolonial literature."
—Trinidad Guardian, Review/2014 OCM Bocas Prize Feature

"Reminds us that storytelling is fundamental to the human condition...A contending classic of postcolonial literature."
—Trinidad Guardian, 2014 OCM Bocas Prize Feature

"I have been hooked on Robert Antoni since his first novel, Divina Trace. His new one, As Flies to Whatless Boys, is a marvel of narrative and documents, which collide to create a book that is at times breathtaking and tragic and at other times laugh-out-loud hilarious."
—Edwidge Danticat, who selected As Flies to Whatless Boys as a Best Book of 2013 for the New Yorker‘s Page-Turner Blog

"A bittersweet coming-of-age tale of tragedy, chicanery, high ideals, harsh realities, and the hard choice between love and family duty, As Flies to Whatless Boys is highly recommended."
—Midwest Book Review

"As Flies to Whatless Boys is a kind of complex word game, a historical narrative in a lilting Caribbean accent, wrapped around with an oddball love story in a wild form of English that seems to create itself as it goes along. In between, snippets of contemporary records provide foils for both these linguistic inventions."
—Historical Novel Society

In 1845 London, an engineer, philosopher, philanthropist, and bold-faced charlatan, John Adolphus Etzler, has invented machines that he thinks will transform the division of labor and free all men. He forms a collective called the Tropical Emigration Society (TES), and recruits a variety of London citizens to take his machines and his misguided ideas to form a proto-socialist, utopian community in the British colony of Trinidad.

Among his recruits is a young boy (and the book's narrator) named Willy, who falls head-over-heels for the enthralling and wise Marguerite Whitechurch. Coming from the gentry, Marguerite is a world away from Willy's laboring class. As the voyage continues, and their love for one another strengthens, Willy and Marguerite prove themselves to be true socialists, their actions and adventures standing in stark contrast to Etzler's disconnected theories.

Robert Antoni's tragic historical novel, accented with West Indian cadence and captivating humor, provides an unforgettable glimpse into nineteenth-century Trinidad & Tobago.

Toni Morrison It is the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentucky, an era is ending as slavery comes under attack from the abolitionists. The worlds of Halle and Paul D. are to be destroyed in a cataclysm of torment and agony. The world of Sethe, however, is to turn from one of love to one of violence and death - the death of Sethe's baby daughter, Beloved, whose name is the single word on the tombstone, who died at her mother's hands, and who will return to claim retribution.

Marlon James One of the Top 10 Books of 2014 – Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book

Named a best book of the year by:
The New York Times
Chicago Tribune
The Washington Post
The Boston Globe
Time
Newsweek
The Huffington Post
The Seattle Times
The Houston Chronicle
Publishers Weekly
Library Journal
Popsugar
BookPage
BuzzFeed Books
Salon
Kansas City Star
L Magazine 

From the acclaimed author of The Book of Night Women comes a “musical, electric, fantastically profane” (The New York Times) epic that explores the tumultuous world of Jamaica over the past three decades.

In A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James combines brilliant storytelling with his unrivaled skills of characterization and meticulous eye for detail to forge an enthralling novel of dazzling ambition and scope.

On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions in Kingston, seven gunmen stormed the singer’s house, machine guns blazing. The attack wounded Marley, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Little was officially released about the gunmen, but much has been whispered, gossiped and sung about in the streets of West Kingston. Rumors abound regarding the assassins’ fates, and there are suspicions  that the attack was politically motivated.

A Brief History of Seven Killings delves deep into that dangerous and unstable time in Jamaica’s history and beyond. James deftly chronicles the lives of a host of unforgettable characters – gunmen, drug dealers, one-night stands, CIA agents,  even ghosts – over the course of thirty years as they roam the streets of 1970s Kingston, dominate the crack houses of 1980s New York, and ultimately reemerge into the radically altered Jamaica of the 1990s. Along the way, they learn that evil does indeed cast long shadows, that justice and retribution are inextricably linked, and that no one can truly escape his fate.

Gripping and inventive, shocking and irresistible, A Brief History of Seven Killings is a mesmerizing modern classic of power, mystery, and insight.

Paule Marshall

J. B. Emtage Ebullient and comedic West Indian novel. Scarce.

Andre Bagoo "Burn is a kaleidoscopic, surreal and stunning collection. Bagoo forges carnivalesque, enigmatic, experimental, vivid, wild and wonder-inspiring poems full of verve and utterly fresh language that are, by turns, eerie, elegiac, fleshy, pensive, mournful, rhapsodic and absolutely scorching...Poems traverse geographical locations, from his island home of Trinidad, to other Caribbean islands and as far distant as Iceland. There, personal and societal angst, passions and pleasures are held up to a 'sea of mirrors,' into which we gaze. Bagoo explores daily life, love, art, history, literature, myth, popular culture, ritual and the molten ground of memory, bringing together and animating douens, lionfish, Auden, Mozart, Caravaggio and Tchaikovsky, among other figures. Bring the fire, burn." -Loretta Collins-Klobah

OONYA KEMPADOO

Derek Walcott This remarkable collection, which won the 1986 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, includes most of the poems from each of Derek Walcott's seven prior books of verse and all of his long autobiographical poem, "Another Life." The 1992 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Walcott has been producing—for several decades—a poetry with all the beauty, wisdom, directness, and narrative force of our classic myths and fairy tales, and in this hefty volume readers will find a full record of his important endeavor. "Walcott's virutes as a poet are extraordinary," James Dickey wrote in The New York Times Book Review. "He could turn his attention on anything at all and make it live with a reality beyond its own; through his fearless language it becomes not only its acquired life, but the real one, the one that lasts . . . Walcott is spontaneous, headlong, and inventive beyond the limits of most other poets now writing."

J. Edward Chamberlin In the last fifty years a powerful and distinctive body of poetry has emerged in the West Indies. Unique in its combination of African sources and British colonial traditions, and still resonating with the curse of slavery, this poetry shares its roots with rap and reggae and has the same hold on the popular imagination. But it has also become part of the English literary heritage and has received international recognition with the work of Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Lorna Goodison, and the 1992 Nobel laureate Derek Walcott."Come Back to Me My Language" is the first comprehensive study of this remarkable body of contemporary poetry. Writing with clarity and vigor, J. Edward Chamberlin discusses the work of more than thirty poets and performers and gives detailed analyses of the major ones. He provides historical and social background to the poetry and places it within the context of current literary criticism. Chamberlin shows how the poets, in rediscovering their language and the freedom to use it, have given their people a new way to see themselves and to look at others.

Caryl. Phillips

J. M. Coetzee Set in post-apartheid South Africa, J. M. Coetzee’s searing novel tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced, 52-year-old professor of communications and Romantic Poetry at Cape Technical University. Lurie believes he has created a comfortable, if somewhat passionless, life for himself. He lives within his financial and emotional means. Though his position at the university has been reduced, he teaches his classes dutifully; and while age has diminished his attractiveness, weekly visits to a prostitute satisfy his sexual needs. He considers himself happy. But when Lurie seduces one of his students, he sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter his complacency and leave him utterly disgraced.

Lurie pursues his relationship with the young Melanie—whom he describes as having hips “as slim as a twelve-year-old’s”—obsessively and narcissistically, ignoring, on one occasion, her wish not to have sex. When Melanie and her father lodge a complaint against him, Lurie is brought before an academic committee where he admits he is guilty of all the charges but refuses to express any repentance for his acts. In the furor of the scandal, jeered at by students, threatened by Melanie’s boyfriend, ridiculed by his ex-wife, Lurie is forced to resign and flees Cape Town for his daughter Lucy’s smallholding in the country. There he struggles to rekindle his relationship with Lucy and to understand the changing relations of blacks and whites in the new South Africa. But when three black strangers appear at their house asking to make a phone call, a harrowing afternoon of violence follows which leaves both of them badly shaken and further estranged from one another. After a brief return to Cape Town, where Lurie discovers his home has also been vandalized, he decides to stay on with his daughter, who is pregnant with the child of one of her attackers. Now thoroughly humiliated, Lurie devotes himself to volunteering at the animal clinic, where he helps put down diseased and unwanted dogs. It is here, Coetzee seems to suggest, that Lurie gains a redeeming sense of compassion absent from his life up to this point.

Written with the austere clarity that has made J. M. Coetzee the winner of two Booker Prizes, Disgrace explores the downfall of one man and dramatizes, with unforgettable, at times almost unbearable, vividness the plight of a country caught in the chaotic aftermath of centuries of racial oppression.

Nicole Blades Young, sea-loving Lily (nee Harriette) is aptly nicknamed after a floating flower. A Bajan high school drop-out, she subsists passively in her grandmother's house at the sufferance of a stern, fundamentalist task-mistress, one who malignly sees in Lily her lost, promiscuous, "wutless" mother. Adrift, born into an "island paradise" which offers few choices to her kind, she must nevertheless identify, then gain the grit and spiritual wherewithal to make them, if she's to escape an out-of-control life of serial beatings at the hands of her first "man," the charismatic, brutal, and finally murderous Goldie (Colvin) Edwards. Through the counsel of her appalled friend Sophie and the wisdoms of a pair of beach Rastas encountered beside her beloved Caribbean, she slowly learns not only that she is, indeed, a lovely flower, but The Rock she must leave via the freedom of primal yet navigable waters, has been the stumbling block set before an unloved female self. With a brilliant ear for both dialogue and dialect, and a great gift for ensemble scenes, Canadian-Bajan novelist Nicole Blades plants us firmly on the soil, not of the tourists', but of the natives' contemporary Caribbean.

V. S. Naipaul Finding the Center by Naipaul, V.S.. 8vo. 1st US ed.

V. S. Naipaul

Gabriel Garcia Marquez After his internationally acclaimed and bestselling Love in the Time of Cholera, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and author of the classic One Hundred Years of Solitude givesreat Simon Bolivar. Forced from power, the General embarks on a seven months' voyage down the Magdalena River, reflecting along the way on his life of campaigns and battles, love and loss.

Anthony C. Winkler A Finalist for the 2014 Townsend Prize for Fiction!

God Carlos has been long-listed for the OMC Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in Trinidad.

"A gusty, boisterous, and entertaining slice of historical fiction. In scenes of a mixture of pride, madness, and comedy, Carlos plays out his role as deity among the naked islanders, living a fantasy that most readers will find believable, if horrific. Along with the horror, the book does offer some beautiful moments of discovery, as when, as Winkler narrates, the ship takes the Mona Passage to Jamaica...we hear of an Edenic island, green and aromatic, opened like a wildflower. For all of its scenes of braggadocio and brutality, the book often works on you like that vision."
—Alan Cheuse, NPR, All Things Considered

"Readers are transported to Jamaica, into Winkler's richly invented 16th century, where his flawless prose paints their slice of time, in turn both brutally graphic and lyrically gorgeous. Comic, tragic, bawdy, sad, and provocative, this is a thoroughly engaging adventure story from a renowned Jamaican author, sure to enchant readers who treasure a fabulous tale exquisitely rendered."
—Library Journal

"A tale of the frequently tragic—and also comic—clash of races and religions brought on by colonization...Anthony Winkler spins an enlightened parable, rich in historical detail and irony."
—Shelf Awareness

"Darkly irreverent...With a sharp tongue, Winkler, a native of Jamaica, deftly imbues this blackly funny satire with an exposé of colonialism's avarice and futility."
—Publishers Weekly

"With perceptive storytelling and bracing honesty, Mr. Winkler, author of a half-dozen well-reviewed books, has a lovely way of telling a good story and educating concurrently...God Carlos teaches history in a subtle but meaningful way. Too literary to be lumped in with typical historical fiction, and too historical to be lumped in with typical literary fiction, God Carlos defies categorization."
—New York Journal of Books

"God Carlos provides a welcome opportunity to glimpse...the lives of ordinary people, both European and Caribbean, as they experience the calamitous effects of the encounter of two worlds."
—Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language, & Culture

"The author's piercing narrative drives home...Here, Winkler's brilliance as a storyteller is unmistakable...God Carlos is a literary tour de force—atmospheric and incisive. It effuses raw emotion—perplexing, bewildering, and dark...On multiple levels, Winkler proves his salt as a genuine raconteur...the architect of an invaluable literary work."
—The Jamaica Gleaner

"Well-written...Winkler's descriptions of sea and sky as seen from a sailing ship, and of the physical beauty of Jamaica, are spot-on and breathtaking."
—Historical Novel Review

"In God Carlos and The Family Mansion, Anthony Winkler, the master storyteller, has provided us with texts of both narrative quality and historical substance that should find place in the annals of Caribbean literature."
—SX Salon

God Carlos transports us to a voyage aboard the Santa Inez, a Spanish sailing vessel bound for the newly discovered West Indies with a fortune-seeking band of ragtag sailors. She is an unusual explorer for her day, carrying no provisions for the settlers, no seed for planting crops, manned by vain, arrogant men looking for gold in Jamaica.

Expecting to make landfall in paradise after over a month at sea, the crew of the Santa Inez instead find themselves in the middle of a timid, innocent people—the Arawaks—who walk around stark naked without embarrassment and who venerate their own customs and worship their own Gods and creeds. The European newcomers do not find gold, only the merciless climate that nourishes diseases that slaughter them. That the Arawaks believed that the arrivals were from heaven makes even more complicated this impossible entanglement of culture, custom, and beliefs, ultimately leading to mutual doom.

Jean Rhys An unforgettable portrait of a woman bravely confronting loneliness and despair in her quest for self-determination, Jean Rhys' "Good Morning Midnight" includes an introduction by A.L. Kennedy in "Penguin Modern Classics". In 1930s Paris, where one cheap hotel room is very like another, a young woman is teaching herself indifference. She has escaped personal tragedy and has come to France to find courage and seek independence. She tells herself to expect nothing, especially not kindness, least of all from men. Tomorrow, she resolves, she will dye her hair blonde. Jean Rhys was a talent before her time with an impressive ability to express the anguish of young, single women. In "Good Morning, Midnight" Rhys created the powerfully modern portrait of Sophia Jansen, whose emancipation is far more painful and complicated than she could expect, but whose confession is flecked with triumph and elation. One of the most honest and distinctive British novelists of the twentieth century, Jean Rhys wrote about women with perception and sensitivity in an innovative and often controversial way. Jean Rhys (1894-1979) was born in Dominica. Coming to England aged 16, she drifted into various jobs before moving to Paris, where she began writing and was 'discovered' by Ford Madox Ford. Her novels, often portraying women as underdogs out to exploit their sexualities, were ahead of their time and only modestly successful. From 1939 (when "Good Morning, Midnight" was written) onwards she lived reclusively, and was largely forgotten when she made a sensational comeback with her account of Jane Eyre's Bertha Rochester, "Wide Sargasso Sea", in 1966. If you enjoyed "Good Morning Midnight", you might like Rhys' "Voyage in the Dark", also available in "Penguin Modern Classics". "Her eloquence in the language of human sexual transactions is chilling, cynical, and surprisingly moving". (A.L. Kennedy).

V.S. NAIPAUL

Pamela Mordecai, Betty Wilson 31 women writers from throughout the Caribbean express the loss and the longing, the pride and passion of the Caribbean identity.

Caryl Phillips Covering three ages, this novel begins in the Caribbean with the slave trade at its height and moves into the 1960s with a series of letters from prison of a black American convict to his family. The final part, set in England, tells of a West Indian who is determined to leave for his native land.

Diana McCaulay In the wake of her mother's death, Leigh McCaulay returns to Jamaica after fifteen years away in New York to find her estranged father and discover whether she has a place she can call home. Not least she must re-engage with the complexities of being white in a black country, of being called to account for the oppressive history of white slave owners and black slaves.

Interwoven with Leigh's return are the stories of two earlier arrivals, both from Scotland—of the abolitionist Zachary Macaulay, who comes as a precocious youth of sixteen to work as a book-keeper on a sugar estate in 1786, and of John Macaulay who comes in 1886, a naive and sometimes self-deluding Baptist missionary, determined to bring light to the heathen.

For each of these arrivals there are discoveries to be made, often painful, about both Jamaica and themselves. Each must come to terms with the contradictions of a society immured in injustice, racial inequality and endemic violence; a landscape of heartbreaking beauty; amd a people who endure with an unquenchable urge for independence.

Robert Edison Sandiford

Derek Walcott

Juan Marinello

Myriam Warner-Vieyra When Helene is packing up her belongings in readiness for her imminent move and marriage, she unearths a faded old exercise book. As she reads she cannot anticipate the effect it will have upon her own future.

It is the diary of Juletane, a young West Indian woman. Written over three weeks, it records her short life; her lonely childhood in France, her marriage to an African student, and her eager return, with him, to Africa — the land of her ancestors. In stark contrast to her naive illusions, the social realities of traditional Muslim life and their cultural demands on her as a woman threaten to drive her to unendurable extremes of loneliness and complete alienation. She is a foreigner, in spite of the color of her skin.

Kei Miller Exploring the relationship between poetry and song, the pieces in this collection work to define the elemental human struggles of good versus evil and light against darkness. The poems take different shapes—newly forged dictionary definitions; praise-songs celebrating the Singerman in a Jamaican road gang; and simple narratives of ghosts, bandits, and other night creatures—and present an accomplished and progressive voice from a new generation of Caribbean writers.

V. S. Naipaul

V.S. Naipaul

V. S. Naipaul Mr Stone likes to be known as Head Librarian with Excal, and dislikes the prospect of retirement. After a brief acquaintanceship with Mrs Springer, he marries her to defend himself against idleness and solitude. Then a foolproof plan strikes him, to introduce the order of the Knights Companion.

V. S. Naipaul The first of Naipaul’s twelve novels tells of the meteoric rise and hilarious metamorphosis of Ganesh Ramsumair from failed primary schoolteacher and struggling masseur to author, revered mystic, peerless politician and the most popular man in Trinidad.

Caryl. Phillips

Thomas Armstrong Of Water and Rock derives its power from the basic human need for connectedness and belonging. When Torontonian Edward Hamblin steps off the plane in Barbados, in the winter of 1969, he crosses more than the tarmac at Seawell Airport. As he navigates the island’s racial and cultural boundaries, he leaves behind an empty life of comfort and discovers a vibrant world of simple beauty, an undiscovered family, and reconciliation with the memory of a long dead father. Powerful converging themes give the novel an emotional strength: Edward Hamblin’s immersion into the post-colonial culture of Barbados; his unresolved animosity towards his long dead Barbadian father who deserted his family when he was young; the poor black peasant farmer, Sissy Braithwaite, and her unrequited love for an abandoned daughter; the wealthy white Mary Collymore’s disconnected life of privilege and racial intolerance. After Sissy’s death, when Edward discovers his Great Aunt’s diary, the apparently disconnected threads are drawn together. As well as revealing the true relationships between the protagonists, Edward hears his father’s voice, comes to understand and pity the man that he has for so long despised, and resolves to unite his newly discovered family in a way his father never could.

Derek Walcott A poem in five books, of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, which simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events — the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement — and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.

Carlos Fuentes

Phyllis Shand Allfrey Lally helps to raise three white sisters in the Orchid House on the Island of Dominica and observes as each flees to the cold northern lands of England and America only to return to their magical past and the man they love. (General Fiction).

Christian Campbell Christian Campbell takes us to dusk, what the French call l’heure entre chien et loup, the hour between dog and wolf, to explore ambiguity and intersection, danger and desire, loss and possibility. These poems of wild imagination shift shape and shift generation, remapping Caribbean, British and African American geographies: Oxford becomes Oxfraud; Shabba Ranks duets with Césaire; Sidney Poitier is reconsidered in an exam question; market women hawk poetry beside knock-off Gucci bags; elegies for ancestors are also for land and sea. Here is dancing at the crossroads between reverence and irreverence. Dusk is memory, dusk is dream, dusk is a way to re-imagine the past.   Running the Dusk won the 2010 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the 2010 Forward Poetry Prize for the Best First Book in the UK. It was also named a finalist for the Cave Canem Prize by Sonia Sanchez.

Carolle Bourne During an extraordinarily sunny Christmas Eve afternoon on the island of St. Vincent, Caroline Ravenspeare sprang full-grown from a patch of foam in the middle of Kingstown Harbour. She has since gone on to sport a lively imagination, her creativity coloured by the sea. This poetic collection serves as an introduction to a Caribbean woman who is anything but typical.

Various Authors

Various, Linda M. Deane, Robert Edison Sandiford Edited by award-winning, Barbadian-based writers Linda M. Deane and Robert Edison Sandiford, this anthology is a showcase of some of the finest contemporary writing on cricket—and is a tribute to the spirit of the game as played in the Caribbean.

The collection represents a literary landmark in Barbados. In a country where cricket is talked about at length and with great passion, Deane and Sandiford have assembled a first-class team of scholars, sportswriters, storytellers, diehard fanatics, and other keen observers who, between them, offer 22 evocative commentaries, or "shouts," on the game and its significance to Caribbean life.

In addition to insightful essays on cricket as a socio-political phenomenon, and analyses of the game's history and current state of play, cricket's multi-faceted appeal is also engagingly witnessed through memoir and personal narrative, poetry, humour, and fiction. The contributions of icons like Sir Gary Sobers and Brian Lara are, meanwhile, given forensic treatment. And although the anthology features a distinctly Bajan batting lineup, the "selectors" were pleased to be able to include writers from further afield—Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Canada, and India.

Vladimir Lucien Winner of:
2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

Vladimir Lucien is a young poet with so many gifts; his poetry is intelligent, musical, gritty in observation, graceful in method. His poems contain stories of ancestors, immediate family, the history embedded in his language choices as a St Lucian writer, and heroes such as Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James, Kamau Brathwaite, and a local steelbandsman. Although never overtly political, there’s an oblique and often witty politics embedded in the poems, as where observing the rise of a grandfather out of rural poverty into the style of colonial respectability, he writes of the man “who eat his farine and fish / and avocado in a civilize fight between / knife and fork and etiquette on his plate.” This is a collection that is alive with its conscious tensions both in subject matter and form. There’s a tension between the vision of ancestors, family, and of the poet himself as being engaged in the business of acting in the world and building on the past, and a sharp awareness of the inescapability of age’s frailty, the decay of memory and of death.

Myriam J.A. Chancy

Naomi Jackson

Nicholas Laughlin Despite the book’s title, these poems are rarely autobiographical and have few straightforward stories to tell. They puzzle over accidents, coincidences, and codes, as they describe journeys and wonders, edging towards a sense of the world’s curious strangeness, the complications of what we call history, the contretemps of geography. The poems belong to a hemisphere of the imagination that encompasses the narratives of 19th-century travelers and 20th-century anthropologists, spy movies, astronomical lore, the writings of Saint-John Perse and Henri Michaux, and the music of Erik Satie. They balance on the edge between concealment and revelation, between fascination and comprehension. For these poems, every sentence is a kind of translation, and language is a series of riddles with no solutions, subtly humorous at one phrase, sinister at another, heartbroken at the next.

V. S. Naipaul In this book, an old, comically timid and absent-minded man, Surujpat Harbans, runs for office, aided by superstition, bribes, and an aggressive compaign.

Ian McDonald, Joel Benjamin, Lakshmi Kallicharan, Lloyd Seawar From 1838 until 1917, Indians arrived to work as indentured labourers in Guyana. The majority never returned to India and today over 50% of the Guyanese population is of Indian origin.

This anthology of prose and poetry shows how the Indians changed the character of Guyana and the Caribbean and how, over 150 years of settlement, Indians became Indo-Guyanese. Ranging from the earliest attempts at cultural self-definition in the 19th century (and early narrative images of the Indian presence in non-Indian writing), to the creative writing of the 1990s, this anthology provides a fascinating insight into the transformation of an ancient culture in the New World.

Extracts from novels, short stories, essays and poems explore the experience of plantation life, of relationships with other ethnic groups, issues of gender within Indo-Guyanese culture and the adjustments in cultural practices which separation from India and involvement with the new environment required.

Brief introductory essays by Jeremy Poynting set historical contexts, and there is an invaluable bibliography of Indo-Guyanese writing. This is the only anthology of its kind.

Robert Edison Sandiford The thirteen stories in The Tree of Youth have a richly exotic, sensuous allure: the landscape shifts from cosmopolitan Canada to beautiful Barbados. They also explore, with understated brilliance, the elation anddefeat men and women everywhere experience when they yearn for love and a better life. Here is an unblinking vision of the sexual exploits of Bajans, young and old, one that restores the redeeming values of children, family, and art.

Geoffrey Philp The lives of contemporary Jamaicans both at home and in exile in Miami are portrayed with humour, pathos and deep understanding. Like the best roots reggae albums, this collection mixes a multitude of voices and attitudes with inventiveness and art. Righteous anger, ragamuffin provocations and insightful observation are present through a variety of forms: social realism, the Jamaican tall tale and even science fiction. The social environments of contemporary Jamaica and Miami are sharply drawn in these stories, but it is the inwardness and humanity of the characterisation which makes them truly memorable.

Martin Carter, Gemma Robinson This collection of poetry, by Martin Carter, a Guyanese poet who delved briefly into politics, is wise, angry, and hopeful while voicing a life lived in times of crisis.

Shani Mootoo In Valmiki’s Daughter, critically acclaimed and best-selling novelist Shani Mootoo returns to the style — and some of the themes — she first explored in her breakout book, Cereus Blooms at Night. Mootoo introduces readers to the Krishnus, a well-to-do Trinidadian family firmly ensconced in the strict social hierarchy of the island. In this story of family secrets, patriarch Valmiki conceals a painful fact about his sexual identity while his youngest, the lively and intelligent Viveka, struggles to come to terms with a painful secret connected to her sexual identity. As Valmiki’s and Viveka’s secrets threaten to shake the foundations of the family, this beautifully written and hypnotically paced novel explores the complex interaction of race, gender, class, and sexuality in a closed society.

V. S. Naipaul

Sharon Millar A boy is killed on a government minister’s orders as part of his mission to clean up the country and others made complicit must explore their consciences; a youth gets ready to play his role in the country’s lucrative kidnap business; a sister tries to make peace with the parents of the white American girl her brother has murdered; a gangster makes his posthumous lament. Trinidad in all its social tumult is ever present in these stories, which range across the country’s different ethnic communities, across rural and urban settings, from locals and expatriates to the moneyed elite and the poor scrabbling for survival. What ties the collection together are not only the characters who thread their way across different stories, but Sharon Millar’s achievement of a distinctively personal voice: cool, unsentimental and empathetic. If irony is the only way to inscribe contemporary Trinidad, there is also room for both generous humor and the possibility of redemption.

Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys, Angela Smith Her grand attempt to tell what she felt was the story of "Jane Eyre's" 'madwoman in the attic', Bertha Rochester, Jean Rhys' "Wide Sargasso Sea" is edited with an introduction and notes by Angela Smith in "Penguin Classics". Born into the oppressive, colonialist society of 1930s Jamaica, white Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent beauty and sensuality. After their marriage, however, disturbing rumours begin to circulate which poison her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is inexorably driven towards madness, and her husband into the arms of another novel's heroine. This classic study of betrayal, a seminal work of postcolonial literature, is Jean Rhys' brief, beautiful masterpiece. Jean Rhys (1894-1979) was born in Dominica. Coming to England aged 16, she drifted into various jobs before moving to Paris, where she began writing and was 'discovered' by Ford Madox Ford. Her novels, often portraying women as underdogs out to exploit their sexualities, were ahead of their time and only modestly successful. From 1939 (when "Good Morning, Midnight" was written) onwards she lived reclusively, and was largely forgotten when she made a sensational comeback with her account of Jane Eyre's Bertha Rochester, "Wide Sargasso Sea", in 1966. If you enjoyed "Wide Sargasso Sea", you might like Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre", also available in "Penguin Classics". "She took one of the works of genius of the nineteenth century and turned it inside-out to create one of the works of genius of the twentieth century". (Michele Roberts, "The Times").

Jean Rhys The fortieth anniversary reissue of the best-selling "tour de force" (Walter Allen, New York Times Book Review).Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon the publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of fiction's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

A sensual and protected young woman, Antoinette Cosway grows up in the lush natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the coldhearted and prideful Rochester, who succumbs to his need for money and his lust. Yet he will make her pay for her ancestors' sins of slaveholding, excessive drinking, and nihilistic despair by enslaving her as a prisoner in his bleak English home.
 
In this best-selling novel Rhys portrays a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.

Jean Rhys The fortieth anniversary reissue of the best-selling "tour de force" (Walter Allen, New York Times Book Review).Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon the publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of fiction's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

A sensual and protected young woman, Antoinette Cosway grows up in the lush natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the coldhearted and prideful Rochester, who succumbs to his need for money and his lust. Yet he will make her pay for her ancestors' sins of slaveholding, excessive drinking, and nihilistic despair by enslaving her as a prisoner in his bleak English home.
 
In this best-selling novel Rhys portrays a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.

Anthony Kellman In the continuing rite of return to his native Barbados from longer and longer away, something has happened to Tony Kellman. No longer are these the alienated poems of the long gap, of belonging nowhere. With greater establishment in America has come the capacity to embrace his past and to see wholly afresh what was once familiar and unremarked.

National Cultural Foundation